Innovative Projects Realized

Hand Hygiene Tracking Prototype Development

SafeContact is a Hospital Acquired Infection (HAI) prevention and reduction Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) company. We are tackling the global HAI epidemic by tracking the source of HAI spread using a unique technological concept in the marketplace. SafeContact is building a smart healthcare platform that combines traditional techniques with the latest advancements in technology: Computer Vision, Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things devices, Big Data, and Machine Learning to monitor hand hygiene behavior for lasting impact on patient safety. This project will assist SafeContact with prototyping to track hand hygiene events in a healthcare setting. The completion of this project will allow SafeContact to secure Venture Capital to commercialize the hand hygiene methodology and business model, which will benefit not only Alberta but also other provinces. While initially targeting at healthcare services, eventually this platform will be available in other sectors, e.g. restaurants and other food supply chains, worldwide, bringing economic and technological benefits to Canada.

Visualization of gene structures, phylogenetic trees, and RNA structures

Bioinformatics is at the intersection of computer science, mathematics and biology. With the advent of new technologies, more and more genomic data is being generated. A common task for analysing such data is to visualize it in an interactive way that highlights the results of computational analyses. In the past 5 years, Web browsers have become very fast at data visualization, creating more opportunities to share bioinformatics results on the Web. This project combines comparative genomics expertise from the CoBIUS lab at UdeS with visualization techniques expertise from the data visualization company Plotly. The project aims at developing interactive tools to compare and visualize gene structures, phylogenies, and RNA structures that include important information from the underlying biological data and facilitate the handling of bioinformatics results. UdeS researchers will benefit from Dash, Plotly’s software for enabling Web data visualization in Python. Plotly will benefit from new bioinformatics applications that use Dash.

Creation of an AI framework for the Restorative Action Program

The Restorative Action Program (RAP) is an incorporated, community-based initiative that provides support to students and staff within public and Catholic school systems, to address conflict and bullying through conflict management and leadership development. The organization has been in existence since 2003 and is currently serving approximately 9,000 students per year and growing. The addition of an intelligent analytical platform will help move the program forward. The main goal is to start quantifying various aspects of their programming that are currently impossible given the constraints that exist within small not-for-profit organizations. Through this project, students, counselors and other small not-for-profit organizations across Canada will gain access to utilities only large organizations can afford.

Decision making with rich ontologies for minerals exploration

Resource extraction, including mineral exploration and mining, is an important part of Canada’s economy. There is currently a great interest in finding the minerals that are needed for batteries; arguably the lack of minerals is the biggest impediment to cutting the price of electric vehicles and weaning society off fossil fuels. Artificial intelligence has great potential in all aspects of minerals exploration. The project has two aspects, the first is to learn symbolic descriptions of lineaments (e.g., faults) from sensor data, and the second is to use such symbolic descriptions (from sensor data and from human observations) to make better informed decisions. The is challenging because the observations use technical terms from multiple ontologies, and parts of the world are described at multiple levels of abstraction (in terms of subtypes) and detail (in terms of parts), and the descriptions often include missing data.

Mobile Application Support for an Outdoor Agriculture Expo’s Temporary Cluster Functions

The Agriculture and Agri-Food System of Canada (AAFS) is an important component of the Canadian economy. Outdoor agricultural shows have moved from their simple marketplace roots to places that facilitate increased productivity, accelerated innovation and business formation. Central to these functions is the geographic concentration of stakeholders. With the growth in show size, supporting effective communication between participants to maximize the potential of this concentration is important and challenging. This project will identify and address the challenges of a large outdoor venue to test the effectiveness of a mobile application in supporting knowledge transfer and participant interaction. Glacier Farm Media will benefit from this project through the ability to offer new services that benefit both the participants and guests of agricultural expos.

Structure of sediments formed in tailings treatment

This project will combine filtration characterization and advanced 3D imaging and modelling of material structures to find ways to improve the recovery of process water from difficult-to-treat tailings that are the by-product of mining and mineral processing. This process is called solid-liquid separation and it is a critical area for the reduction of oil sands tailings volumes. Due to the chemistry and solids composition of oil sands tailings, they are extremely resistant to dewatering. Attempts to improve solid-liquid separation in these systems have been pursued by practitioners and researchers in the form of a variety of chemical and mechanical treatment methods. Despite modest gains and comparative improvements in water recovery and ultimate material performance, no mature technology has been developed that adequately addresses the dewatering imperative imposed by environmental, social, and economic factors. This project suggests a novel approach to characterizing tailings suspension that may be the basis for the development or improvement of solid-liquid separation treatment methods and technology.

CIO to CEO – Barriers and Opportunities – Phase II

This is a continuation of a MITACS sponsored study for the Chief Information Officers

Association of Canada, Ontario Chapter, to assist its members in long term career planning

and development. It will refine and further validate a model for advancement from CIO to

CEO, by interviewing CEOs who have successfully made the transition. In total, some 50

CEOs will participate, who are currently leading large organisations in Canada and the United

States. This is new work, addressing a topic about which there has been much speculation,

but little field research. Support of the CIO Association will facilitate recruitment of the study

participants. The project findings will be disseminated in a White Paper to be published by the

Association, in at least 1 refereed journal paper and will also be presented at a national CIO

Conference in 2012. The Intern will have a unique opportunity to meet with and interview top

executives from a wide range of organisations.

Grandir les hassidim de demain : l’expérience de New York

Comment les enfants grandissent-ils au sein des communautés juives hassidiques de New York ? Quelles représentations guident les pratiques des mères dans ce processus ? De quelle façon le genre, la langue et l’école sont pensés et interviennent dans la socialisation des enfants ? Et enfin, comment se déroulent les interactions entres mères et enfants hassidiques au quotidien ? Axé sur deux séjours de recherche de six semaines, ce projet explore la manière dont les enfants hassidiques grandissent à New York aujourd’hui. Deux niveaux d’analyse seront retenus : d’une part on retracera les représentations qui façonnent les pratiques des mères hassidiques; d’autre part, par le biais d’une enquête ethnographique, on examinera leur articulation avec le déroulement quotidien du processus de socialisation, observé dans les interactions entre mères et enfants. Cette recherche permettra d’aborder empiriquement et en dehors des controverses les enjeux de l’éducation au sein d’une communauté considérée comme fermée, tel que les juifs hassidiques. Dans une perspective comparative avec notre travail de thése, elle nous permettra de faire émerger la spécificité de la socialisation hassidique new-yorkaise, face à l’expérience montréalaise.

PROJET ANÉMONE. : Algorithmes d’aNticipation des dÉfauts, de leurs MOdéliation et de leurs Neutralisation anticipée.

Afin d’optimiser son processus et de tirer profit du cumul des connaissances accumulées dans les compagnies, le projet porte sur la mise en oeuvre et l’extension d’un dispositif d’interprétation des KPI générés dans le but de réduire l’implication humaine et de fournir aux experts un outil pour les guider dans l’analyse des causes dans le but de prévenir l’émergence de dysfonctionnements d’opération des équipements sous surveillance.
De plus, ce projet a pour principal livrable la réalisation d’un outil pour détecter des dérives multidimensionnelles complexes, de les anticiper et de communiquer avec la clientèle de manière persuasive à la manière d’un expert métier.

A data visualization framework to leverage text and knowledge graphs

The goal of this work will be to explore different ways to visualize and interact with knowledge extracted automatically from very large heterogeneous document collections. This extracted knowledge will be in the form of a multi-attribute graph of extracted entities and relationships between them. These relationships will be associated with both temporal and spatial information. The work conducted will focus in identifying the best ways to visually represent and interact with content from two application domains — medicine and journalism — both including thousands of entities and relationships. By leveraging these very distinct domains, we aim to provide a unified framework and initial prototype to navigate large multivariate knowledge graphs that is potentially applicable across multiple domains.

Analysis of bacterial motility on varied surface chemistry

Bacterial biofilm formation on medical devices remains an unsolved medical challenge. Biofilms are communities of bacteria within which bacteria are able to become highly resistant to antibiotics and the host’s immune system. Developing materials that prevent biofilm formation is limited by a lack of understanding about how bacteria attach to and form biofilm on surfaces. In this project single cells will be observed in three dimensions using digital holographic microscopy to see how they interact with surfaces. The project will establish computer algorithms that can rapidly analyze the images and extract key parameters such as speed, acceleration and curvature and categorize different swimming patterns. This will be done using a range of different materials that bacteria respond to differently to establish the variations in bacteria behavior that relate to the prevention in biofilm formation. These studies will, thus, help underpin the development of materials resistant to biofilm formation.

Development of Functional Nanoparticles for Targeted Biomaterial Cell Delivery

Genetic engineering has proven to be a useful approach for gene therapy and transformation of value-added agricultural plants. However, the current available technologies suffer from several limitations. These include relative low delivery efficiency with difficult-to-deliver cells or complex constructs and limit freedom-to-operate. Considering advances have been made in the applications of nanotechnology to life science and plant biology, particularly in the realm of gene editing technology, improving delivery efficiency is urgently needed. We propose to develop functional nanomaterials, which will provide an innovative, efficient, and low-cost alternative for conventional methods of biomolecule delivery. It will also accelerate the development of targeted therapy and value-added plants.